BSR | Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar 21 2018, Facebook updated its public-facing Community Standards to include its internal review guidelines, giving the public more detail on where the company draws the line on content. Facebook’s Community Standards are implemented by a Community Operations Team (which is doubling in size to 20,000 people during 2018) who review content in more than 50 languages to ensure that Community Standards are enforced. This team includes experts in areas such as child safety, hate speech, terrorism, and law. In August 2018, Facebook reported that it employed 60 Myanmar language experts to review content, with the expectation to have at least 100 by the end of 2018.61 The Community Operations Team benefits from the existence of detailed written guidance about how to enforce the Community Standards in a local context, such as specific slurs, flagged words, and illustrative cases. These evolve over time, based on lessons learned from real-life cases, changes in social, political, and local context, and engagement with stakeholders. Engineers at Facebook are also building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist the Community Operations Team in proactively identifying content that violates the Community Standards, including AI that works in the Burmese language. The quality and accuracy of AI is expected to improve over time as the volume of cases and data increases. In August 2018, Facebook reported that it proactively identified about 52 percent of the content removed for hate speech in Myanmar in the second quarter of 2018, up from 13 percent in the final quarter of 2017.62 The consequences for violating Community Standards vary, depending on the severity of the violation and a person's history on the platform—for example, Facebook may warn someone for a first violation, but if they continue to violate policies, Facebook may restrict the user’s ability to post on Facebook or disable their profile. Law enforcement may be notified when there is a genuine risk of physical harm or a direct threat to public safety. It should be noted that Facebook deals with misinformation by making it less prominent in the News Feed, rather than by removing it. In July 2018, Facebook altered its credible violence policies to more proactively delete inaccurate or misleading information created or shared with the purpose of contributing to, or exacerbating, violence or physical harm.63 While this change is being made at the global level, it has specific relevance for Facebook in Myanmar. In August 2018, Facebook removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account, and 52 Facebook Pages in Myanmar, and banned 20 individuals and organizations from Facebook, including Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the military’s Myawady television network. This action was taken to prevent them from using Facebook to further inflame ethnic and religious tension, and because of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, including the use of seemingly independent news and opinion Pages to covertly push the messages of the Myanmar military.64 61 Facebook, 2018(a). Facebook, 2018(a). 63 Facebook (b), accessed September 2018. 64 Facebook, 2018(b). 62